Electronic online information services that contain documents (as opposed to structured databases and transaction systems) emerged in the 1960s. These first generation services held all content on one server (such as DIALOG). Therefore, users normally understood the characteristics of the documents based on which service they used. Distributed online information services began with networked bulletin board systems such as UUCP, USENET, FIDOnet. However, these services were used by a tiny section of the population ad did not contain data that was used to make important personal or business decisions. A third generation of online information emerged at the end of the 1980s as the Internet became common on college campuses, businesses and government agencies. The World Wide Web was developed under the leadership of Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, as a method of fetching information from any cooperating computer on the Internet by simply clicking on a reference to that information. With the release of the first high-function Web browser program, Mosaic, by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in early 1994, millions of users began to have access to millions of documents through the World Wide Web. These documents contain text, graphics, audio, video, etc.
The World Wide Web contains information that is updated regularly, and therefore is in many ways superior to consulting books or CD-ROMs. However, users may have trouble contextualizing the retrieved information: was it accurate when posted (made available), is it still accurate now, etc. The challenge of editorial assessment of a huge body of constantly changing and growing information, with no central depository site, forces users to depend upon independent assessments of the retrieved data. Users are familiar with doing this in other domains, such as "the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" for household goods.
It was recognized by the W3 Consortium and other voluntary standard groups for the World Wide Web that some automated mechanism of delivering assessments to users was needed. The urgent need for these items, ironically, is not being driven by business or other decision making based on Web information, but by a need to have filtering of adult-only material from young people who access the Web. Because it is easy to click from one document to another (which the one document points to) to another in seconds, this "traveling browsing" has become known as surfing the Web. In surfing the Web, children may have easy access to inappropriate videos, graphical data and other related information.
To address this issue, several mechanisms have been proposed and/or implemented. For example, the application sold under the trademark WATCHDOE by Surfwatch allows a supervisor (i.e. a parent) to block particular content from being retrieved when browsing the World Wide Web. On a subscription basis, users periodically receive disks that contain a data base of blocked sites. The user then executes a utility program that updates the existing data base of blocked sites with the updated data base of blocked sites in the disks. When the user browses on the Web, the application cross-references the data base and selectively blocks the loading of data from blocked sites identified in the data base.
Another application sold under the trademark WEBTRACK from Webster Network Strategies will block access to particular primary content sites, in 15 specific categories. Like SURFWATCH, WEBTRACK stores a list of blocked sites in a data base, and when the user browses the Web, the application cross-references the data base and selectively blocks the loading of data from block sites identified in the data base. However, in this case, the data base is not created and updated on a subscription basis, but may be created and updated by the supervisor.
KIDSCODE is an Internet Draft proposal which uses a naming convention to indicating ratings, and requires voluntary compliance by primary publisher of the content data.
The above applications fail to address the need for reviewer's tools which can efficiently develop new and revised advisories on content loaded (or available to be loaded) by a client from a content server via a protocol between the client and any number of independent non-co-located or combined advisory servers that maintain "ratings" knowledge bases.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system, method and computer program product for efficiently developing advisories based on rational factors, including, for example: suggestions from users of the advisory service; as yet unrated content for which queries are being received; and request from providers of new and revised primary content.
Additional objects and advantages of the present invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practicing the invention.